


At the River That Day

by MyBloodyUnicorn



Series: Nothing Gold Can Stay [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Fluff, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-28
Updated: 2013-07-28
Packaged: 2017-12-21 16:11:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/902253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyBloodyUnicorn/pseuds/MyBloodyUnicorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Daphne Allen found Emmanuel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At the River That Day

Afterward, with the sweat still scarcely dried on your skin, he asks you, “What were you doing out by the river that day?”

You look up, from where your finger has been idly tracing a figure-eight on his chest, up into his face. The room is lit only from the orange glow of a streetlamp outside the window but it’s enough to see his hair, mussed and sticking up where your hands ran through it.   

He looks at you in that guileless way, eyebrows drawn together in thought, unsmiling but not unkind. Never unkind.

And you look away and you lie.

"Hiking," you say. "I was hiking when I found you."

His fingers run up and down the spine between your shoulders, softly, like he’s strumming an instrument. _Can he tell?_ you think. _Could you ever tell him why you had really been there that day?_

"I saw you, you know, long before you saw me," you continue, the truth this time. "I had been looking at the lake and how still it was. And I saw this ripple of something moving, I thought maybe you were swimming and then I realized you were just walking."

He leans down, buries his nose in your hair, a warm huff of breath on your scalp.

"And then you just strolled straight out—" you wriggle up until your lips brush his neck "—as naked as you are right now."

"I don’t really remember much from that day," he says, as ever, with consternation.

You remember everything. Asking his name, where he had come from, was he okay, was he sure he was okay. That the setting sun lit the drops of water on his skin. The sudden realization your hand was gripping the shoulder of a stranger—a wet, naked, confused stranger—and flinching as if you’d been burned.

"Why did you have so many clothes with you that day?" he asks.

You had left him shivering in the cold, insisting he stay put while you nearly ran back to your car. Popping open the trunk, you tore into a black garbage bag filled with clothes, the ones you told yourself would be brought to the charity shop, only you never managed to get there. You pulled out a man's t-shirt gone soft and almost translucent with age, a pair of jeans, a gray sweater, a pair of shoes with traces of ancient mud crumbling from the soles from the last time they had been worn.

His hand reaches under your chin and tips your face up to see his. "You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to."

"It’s okay," you say at last. "They were his. The last of what I still had, the things I had kept because I couldn’t part with them." He looks at you with an expression you can’t quite read in the near dark. Something like sadness but maybe also affection. He presses soft lips to your forehead.

"It’s okay. I’m okay. After five years, it was time to go. To _let_ go, I mean." You withdraw slightly, enough to prop yourself on one elbow to look at his face. You smooth the tousled hair, run your thumb over the ridge of his brow, trace the line of his full bottom lip with a fingertip.

That day, you had asked—no, _begged_ , really, _pleaded_ —for a sign, a reason, _something anything please God please_ , to tell you should keep going. When nothing came, you decided you wanted the river to be the last thing your eyes saw, the sun setting behind the mountains and the almost imperceptible little waves lapping the lake’s edge.

And then the water stirred.

He rolls towards toward you, one arm under his head while his other hand slips down your back and touches your hip tentatively. You respond, pressing the full length of your body to his, wrapping your arm around his waist and pulling him close, feeling his desire for you start to stir against the heat of your skin.

You kiss him once, gently, and then again, more forcefully, when his hand tightens on your hip. His hand skims down your thigh and hooks the back of your knee, pulling your leg over his own, pressing his body harder into yours. You pull away from kissing him, leaving him with lips slightly parted, and you murmur against his mouth the one thing, the only thing, you’ve been thinking every single time you look at him.

"Emmanuel..." you say at last, "I think God wanted me to find you."

 


End file.
